opinion:game battle engines, what's the best kind?

I've seen so many different battle engines in games, what kind of battle engine is best though? I like the real time style battle engines like the zelda series, but I also like the rpg battle engines, cause your actually keeping track of the players stats while alot of live real time battle engines fail to implement that.
what's are your opinions?

It depends on the game. Imagine playing through Zelda: LTTP with the battle system from Final Fantasy I. Now imagine it the other way around. You're playing FF1 with the LTTP battle system. You kill everything on the world map and don't numerically see the damage you're doing, etc...

If I were to make an adventure/RPG, I'd look at the general pace of action of my game and the control I give to the player of the character's numerical stats.

If I want the player to be able to tweak every single aspect of their character (Xenosaga) I'd want a turn based battle system that lets them have the same amount of control in battle.

And if all the player controls is the number of hearts his/her life meter has, then it would be better to just have a rush-in-pow-pow-pow-everything-dies-in-seconds battle. The middle ground would probably be something like the ATB system in FF4-9 and Chrono Trigger.

The best solution though is to recognize what's cool and what sucks out of each of these battle systems. Then frankenstein one that's all cool

I am personally a fan of phased based where I enter all my moves for the turn, and then it plays it out (entity with the highest agility goes first and so on) unto the next phase. This also allows for macros, which are nice at speeding up a battle, or executing combo moves with multiple players

i 'm a big fan rune so i prefer a realtime system. when in final fantasy sometimes when doing exploring and stuff i often get anoyed if i get attacked again and again by monsters that don't give enough xp to make the battle worthwhile (considering time wasted on battle intro, time taken for the turn). the only drawback you have on a realtime system is that for an rpg dexterity is rather player-controlled than character-controlled, but you could try to compensate that by changing the attack moves based on how much dexterity the character has.

c_dev Wrote:when in final fantasy sometimes when doing exploring and stuff i often get anoyed if i get attacked again and again by monsters that don't give enough xp to make the battle worthwhile (considering time wasted on battle intro, time taken for the turn).

Earthbound had an awesome system for this. If you encountered an enemy (which you can see plainly coming after you) and you were way stronger than them, you'd instantly kill them and get any exp, money and items. No battle screen at all.

One thing I don't like in RPG's is when your attributes go up by a random amount per level. There's really no reason for it to be random, especially when you're not given a choice as to your character. To get the best numbers, I can just get to one battle away from a level-up and save. I get my level-up on the next battle, and if I don't like the numbers, I reset and do it again. It's ridiculous. It's especially ridiculous when the numbers really make a difference (7th Saga.)

JustinFic Wrote:To get the best numbers, I can just get to one battle away from a level-up and save. I get my level-up on the next battle, and if I don't like the numbers, I reset and do it again. It's ridiculous.

there is a system against this: you just don't get to restore an older game , if you're not happy with the stats you get for the level, you need to encounter a level draining monster...

Random stats per level (and a lot of things that are sort of stupid about a lot of rpgs) are really Dungeons and Dragons legacy (though I admit these problems didn't make Neverwinter Nights any less fun to play.) In a computer game you could use a lot more complicated formula for stats at level or tables so you wouldn't need that frustrating element of re-rolling.

Either type of game is fun to play, though in turn-based rpgs, combat with small enemies really does get tedious- some of the worst offenders are game that will put puzzles in them where you have to cross an entire room many times to figure out the puzzle, all the while having to fend off monsters over and over.

Now, ignoring all the small fights between bosses, a boss fight in these two different systems is fairly different and I'd say as fun in either system- you get plenty of time to plan out what you want to do, and need to do some thinking in the sort of turn-based game, while in a real-time game you just need to be able to catch the pattern as well as do some timing- if the amount of damage done is a little slower over time though you can have some of the turn-based aspects of thinking about what would be the best strategy- but then user-interface can become a hinderance when trying to select your actions before something bad happens. It's somewhat of a trade-off.

A tactical rpg (e.g. Final Fantasy Tactics) takes this ratio of regular fights to boss fights to extreme by essentially making every fight a boss fight, in that you have to put a lot of attention into each fight and do a considerable amount of thinking about it. This would work fine if all fights are evenly spaced, which is why there's a lot less wandering to do in those games.

If you are somewhat experienced and have a reasonable amount of time, I do think the best thing for an innovative, modern game is what Justin said, which is you try to make a hybrid system with some aspects from either game. The recent "Tales of Symphonia" is a good example. If you haven't really worked on many game before you will find it a lot easier to duplicate an existing system to a large extent; I think of the two systems it would be a lot easier to make a turn-based rpg, because you don't have to worry about collision, timing, and other real-time elemnts. Also if you really want to do real-time a tile-based system is really easy to make- each player or enemy can only move from one tile to the next (you could animate it smoothly- maybe later) and you could only attack one tile in any of either 4 or 8 directions. Diablo is actually kind of like this except more elaborate.

Really, any genre you choose can be successful- but to do so you just have to innovate and get rid of all the problems that make the genre annoying.

thanks for all your advice guys, I think I'm gonna go with a hybrid system. somewhere between final fantasy, and zelda style. where you can see the enemies on the screen, and attempt to avoid them, and if you run into them, it becomes a turn based battle, then when you defeat them, their sprites dissapear and you get all your xp, gold, etc. all the people on idevgames.com forums are always so helpful. thanks to all of you